


Rags and Bones

by tsukinofaerii



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Nightmare Before Christmas - Fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukinofaerii/pseuds/tsukinofaerii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam has been stitched and restitched a thousand times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rags and Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dimeliora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimeliora/gifts).



> A much belated birthday request for Dime, who asked for a SPN/NBC fusion featuring Jack!Dean and Sally!Sam. It's a brief glimpse into a larger universe that will probably never get written, alas.

Azazel leaned over Sam, needle flashing silver as he worked on some of the more delicate stitching in Sam's fingers. The new thread was bright red and felt hot where it pulled through his skin. The stitches formed a lovely, complex pattern that sometimes ran down the length of his fingers or up his wrists for no apparent reason. Sam tried to look at them once, to follow the lines and make sense of the shapes, but they made his chest burn and his eyes water.

From the wrong angle, Azazel looked like someone familiar, but Sam could never quite place it, a dangling memory that he couldn't quite stretch enough to grasp. Probably it was just something left over from the brain Azazel had put in him, but it _felt_ real. Trapped in the castle as much as he was, few things did. 

"This new thread should hold up better," Azazel told him, mumbling through a mouthful of too many teeth, his eyes gleaming yellow. "You just use your hands too much, boy. I keep telling you to use you head, don't I?"

"I like my hands," Sam said stubbornly, glancing down at them before looking back up at the spider webs on the ceiling. He counted the little squirming bundles of flies that would be dinner soon and tried to ignore the feeling of being taken apart. He'd been stitched and restitched a thousand times; Azazel liked redesigning him, and had been doing it forever. There wasn't anything new in it. 

But even though it was all familiar, the process left him feeling hollow and achy. The lab table was hard and cold, and the leather straps holding Sam in place were scratchy. Old claw marks scarred the leather, cutting through dark splashes of blood stains and acid marks that left the straps thin in some spots. Sam tried not to look at those, either. None of Azazel's other creations were still in the castle, and he knew better than to ask.

The last bit of thread slid through his thumb, a hot, burning thing that made Sam bite his lip. Then the thread was being knotted off, Azazel's sharp teeth snapping through it like a piece of Halloween candy. 

"Flex," Azazel snapped, turning around to put his things away. 

Obediently, Sam flexed his fingers and palms. The stitches felt tighter, but when he made a fist they stretched with his knuckles. The red thread knotted between his fingers and crossed over his palms like a lifeline, tiny stitches creating a pattern of circles and curved lines that looked like they were alive. Flourishes and curves danced in patterns that seemed pretty rather than functional. Then they ran up his arms in spirals, and Sam wondered if it was so that he couldn't pull his stitches easily to hide things—or escape by sacrificing a limb. 

Azazel didn't like it when Sam escaped.

Just as he opened his mouth to ask, the doorbell rang, a huge _bong_ that rattled the stones of the castle and made dust drop from the spider webs overhead. 

Flattening his lips, Azazel flapped his wrist at Sam. It creaked like the leather straps, joints popping and skin sliding around like it wasn't really attached to the muscle. "Go work on your exercises," he snapped, unfolding from his chair. Sam didn't even have time to say _okay_ before Azazel was trundling up the steps to the basement door. He walked like a short man on stilts. Nothing about his joints worked quite naturally, though it took being around him for a long time to really see it. 

Sam waited until the door was closed and he couldn't hear Azazel walking anymore before creeping up the stairs to the door. Keeping as low as possible, he opened the door and slipped through, leaving it slightly cracked behind him in case he needed to hurry back. Sometimes the heavy wooden slab stuck, and there wouldn't be time to force it open if he was caught. 

Shadows danced on the walls where the torches fluttered. He avoided them, bending down to stay hidden in the shadows. There were voices somewhere up ahead, three of them. Azazel's voice was smooth as the satin lining of a brand new coffin, but the other two were rough. Hard, and scraping, nothing like the people who usually came begging to Azazel for favors.

"—always ready to help the Pumpkin King," Azazel said as Sam leaned around a thick stone pillar. He had his back to Sam and his shoulders were rounded, posture softened. There was something thick and smug in his voice, like he was barely containing a cackle of laughter. "A new scarecrow, you say? Didn't think you were the scarecrow sort."

One of the visitors, a rickety old man in a wooden wheel chair, snorted. "Not one of your fancy ones," he said, shaking a finger at Azazel. His hair stuck up around a battered hat like he'd been electrocuted, and his wheelchair looked close to collapsing in on itself. "No hookmen."

"It's just for the haunted house," the second visitor added. He was just off to the side enough that Sam couldn't really see him, but the voice resonated in his bones, in the brain and heart that Azazel had stitched into him. Sam _knew_ that voice. "Old Scary is retiring this year."

Leaning out, Sam peeked carefully at Azazel to be sure it was safe, then twisted around the bottom of the pillar. What he saw almost made him pop a stitch.

It was a skeleton, but not just any skeleton. His cheekbones were high and sharp as knives, and a bit of green glinted in the hole where eyes used to be. When he moved, there was a very subtle clicking noise that wasn't coming from his joints, but from something tapping against his bones under his jacket, a little flash of metal against his breastbone. 

_Dean_ , Sam's brain coughed up from the dusty, blurred depths of memory. Dean, the Pumpkin King. 

The three kept talking, hashing out details for the new scarecrow, but Sam no longer had any thoughts for that. Acting more on instinct than reason, he reached up and dug his fingers into his eye socket. The eyeball squished to the side a little before popping free in his palm. It rolled around, splitting his vision into two sharply different views of the ceiling before finally swiveling around to stare back at him. Taking aim, Sam waited until no one was looking, then lobbed it at Dean.

The eyeball soared through the air, bouncing off a ceiling beam, then a pillar and finally the floor before slipping down the back of the Pumpkin King's collar. It rolled down the ribs and spine, finally coming to rest near the hip bones. Then it wiggled into place, wedging itself down and turning around to peek out from under the edge of the skeleton's jacket. Sam could make out the edge of the first man's elbow and some of Azazel's chest, but that was all. 

It would have to do. There weren't exactly many places to hide an eyeball on a skeleton. 

While the chatter went on, Sam slipped back down the hall to his basement dungeon. Azazel had extra eyes down there. He could borrow one until he got his own eye back. Whenever that would be.

* * *

Sam really should have thrown an ear in there, too. 

While paying half-attention to his chores, Sam got plenty of fascinating glimpses of the Pumpkin King's unlife through the gap in the jacket. The sleek black chariot that carried him around, the bone fencing of his yard, the tall tower that was his home. The man he'd been at Azazel's with stayed with him almost all day before going off on his own, and while Sam assumed that they talked, he didn't have any idea what it might have been about. What he didn't get from any of these glimpses was context.

Vials and jars and the bottom edges of books passed briefly through Sam's range of vision. Occasionally, he felt his eyeball squeeze when he bent down and the rib bones compressed. Something red was splashed—drawn?—on the floor, much too bright to be blood, but what else was there in Halloween town that was bright red? Whatever it was, Dean seemed very focused on it. He walked circles around it a lot, and often bent down to make changes to it.

There was something about that drawing, and the books and all the work that was happening. But the Pumpkin King never happened to drop the books below Sam's eye, and if he said anything, Sam didn't have an ear to hear it with. 

This was going to take some time.

* * *

Weeks passed, the nights ticking down to Halloween. Sam did his chores with his head down and avoided looking at Azazel more than he had to. His obedience made Azazel suspicious but couldn't be helped. Sam's eyes matched close enough, but it was hard to see what was in front of him instead of what was in front of Dean. The borrowed eye listed a little, spinning erratically when he didn't concentrate. If Azazel saw, there'd be trouble. 

When Sam could pay attention to his roving eye, what he saw was fascinating and boring by turns. There was lots of nothing—times when Dean would stare at a wall, or pace in endless circles. Sometimes he went on drives in his black charriot, and all Sam could see was the front panel. He was restless, always moving, fidgeting, staying busy, even if it was doing nothing Sam could make sense of.

But then there were other things. The Pumpkin King was thick in the planning for Halloween. That was interesting by itself, with the haunted house, vampires plans for window-hopping, the mummies and the ghouls and all sorts of meetings. Sam didn't need to be able to hear to get the gist of what was going on, and it was fascinating.

On top of all of it, there was what he did at home, with the shutters pulled and curtains dropped. Books, all kinds of books. Big books, thin books, old and new and scrolls and journals. Most of them came and went, but there was one he read almost every night. Then there were the circles, and midafteroon visitors and blood. A lot of blood, from little bags and pouches. They looked like experiments, though from Sam's angle it could have been anything. He even could have been trying new recipes for Halloween treats. 

As the calendar flipped closer to Halloween, though, Azazel's suspicions turned sharp. He'd call Sam's name when he was daydreaming, snapping him out of whatever Dean was doing at the time. Or he'd give Sam chores that forced him to use both eyes and his brain, like balancing the town council's budget, or drawing out symbols that he said Sam might remember from the bad old days. Lessons got harder, too. They ramped up from just moving things to holding them steady for hours on end. Some days, Sam didn't even have the time to watch Dean pace. 

One thing was clear, Sam thought, as he sat in the middle of the library and organized the books without lifting a finger. As much as he liked being part of Dean's life—in a superficial sort of way—he needed his eye back.

 _How_ was the question. The Pumpkin King hadn't exactly been a regular visitor. He'd never come back after talking to Azazel about the new scarecrow, though Sam thought he'd seen glimpses of the castle's outside walls, like Dean was hovering just outside, so the castle probably hadn't grown legs and walked away again. Regardless, Dean wasn't coming back, and Sam couldn't leave without Azazel knowing; the demon followed every move he made, it seemed like. 

A book swooped out of the lineup and attacked, cover flapping viciously. Sam shouted and smacked it out of the air. It slammed into the wall, then slid down to the floor in a sad pile of bent pages. On its cover, the words _Beginners' Poisons_ gleamed in fading gold.

* * *

Azazel was snoring like a sleeping hellhound when Sam slipped out of the castle and into the empty streets. The place was a living town, a bright sun peeking through the gloom overhead and the fountain bubbling gently. Everyone was resting up; Halloween was only in a week. Sam rounded the sun-shaded entrances of the vampire's tombs and ducked through the graveyard as a shortcut. A few ghosts grumbled when he stepped on their graves, but not very loudly.

Dean's tower was near the center of Halloween Town, as befitted the Pumpkin King. It was wonderfully old and ruined, with fallen bricks all around, the door hanging off its hinges and giant spider webs in the dead garden at its base. Sunlight couldn't ruin the delicious shiver of horror that ran down Sam's spine when he walked through one. 

From the way Sam's eye had been staring, unmoving, at the ceiling for an hour, Dean was probably asleep. Which was good; Sam couldn't exactly ring the door bell.

Standing at the base of the tower, Sam stared upward toward the window. There was a gargoyle by the door, so he couldn't pick the lock. Tunneling would take too much time; Azazel would probably only be out for a few hours. He could ask some bats for a lift, but they wouldn't be out until nightfall. That was much too late.

That really only left one answer.

Steeling himself, Sam grabbed ahold of the rocky wall of the tower and started to climb. Rock crumbled like soft cheese in his hands. His stitches stretched uncomfortably at his elbows and knees, making him feel loose around the edges, rag stuffing poking out here and there. Dean's tower wasn't the tallest thing Sam had ever had to scale; there was a tower where Azazel did the final resurrection that was much higher, and Sam had to go up there once when the winch had gotten stuck. 

Still, he was panting and tired by the time he reached the top and was able to dangle from the window ledge. Swinging cautiously, Sam twisted until he could throw a leg over the balcony, then waited. Once he was sure his stitches would hold, he finished pulling himself up and over, landing with a soft thump on the floor. 

The tower was different when he had more than just an eye to see it. What he'd thought was chaos was actually tidy, with all the work spaces carefully organized and out of the way. Grainy photos from Halloweens past hung on the wall, all of them showing Dean right in the center, rib cage puffed out and skeletal face beaming with pride. 

Sam couldn't stop himself from nosing around, poking Dean's knickknacks and paddywacks, polishing a bit here and there. He ran his finger across a metal plate with strange letters and numbers on it, avoided a piece of bone with even stranger carvings and spent long minutes playing with a colorful spring. There was so _much_ of it that he hadn't seen through his eye, so many things that Sam wanted to know about.

He wondered how many ghouls had had a chance to explore Dean's things, other than him. Not many. Vampires had their clans and the werewolves had their packs, but no one ran with the Pumpkin King. Even the man in the wheelchair hadn't seemed to stop by much. 

Not really that different from Sam. 

It was time to get the eye and go. _Now_.

All of the ceilings looked mostly the same, so Sam tried to find what landmarks he could. There was the miniature bloodstone circle, and there was the stain on the wall that looked like a witch's face, and the stairs... 

He followed them all the way to a little nook three levels down. Dean slept in an open coffin, right next to a family of bats. They stirred and gave Sam some drowsy looks, but didn't seem to mind when he came close. In the coffin, Dean was pale and thin, all of the energy gone from his eye sockets. He looked _tired_. Sam had never known a skeleton could look tired.

The eyeball peeked out from between the buttons of Dean's jacket. Sam edged it up carefully and curled his fingers around it. It had been wedged in hard, though, and didn't want to move. Frowning, he pulled harder, twisting it until it squirted jelly from a cut on its side. The ribs around it wiggled and bounced with the movement. 

Dean snorted a laugh. 

Sam froze, his sawdust hard freezing. Hurriedly, he yanked the eyeball free and ran for the stairs. A second later, he heard Dean wake up with a clatter of bones and startled cry. The stairs creaked and swayed as Sam pounded up them, racing for the window with the Pumpkin King rousing behind him. He made the top level and sprinted outright, stitches snapping under the pressure. 

Just as Sam reached the window, he heard a startled, "Sammy?" behind him. 

He didn't look back, just grabbed the curtain and leaped. The rotten cloth unraveled in his grip, slowing him down enough that when he landed only an arm popped free. Sam picked it up in his attached hand and sped away, leaping over gravestones and a small giant lizard.

When the air started to burn his lungs and Sam couldn't hear the Pumpkin King anymore, he ducked into a tomb to catch his breath. The eye he'd reclaimed rolled around in his unattached palm, staring forlornly back at its master and giving Sam a terrible case of double vision. If eyes could have emotions of their own, he suspected this one would have missed Dean.

What was weird was, Sam did, too. 

"Don't worry," he told his eye, reaching down to pull a spare needle and thread from where he'd poked them through his calf for storage. "We're not giving up yet."

After all, Halloween was in a week. Once it died down, Sam would have ample time to find out all there was to know about Dean. 

Including how he knew Sam's name.


End file.
